Full Nerd's favorite CPU of 2017

But first, the day of reckoning is here. We kick off the show by revisiting our PC predictions for 2017, which we made all the way back in December of last year—before Ryzen, before Optane SSDs, before Radeon Vega, before the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. We got a lot right! But predictions aren’t any fun without consequences. For the ones we got wrong, we literally eat the paper our words are written on. Gordon winds up chowing down on damned near an entire footlong sub stuffed with scraps. Fiber’s good for you, right?

These aren’t PCWorld’s formal picks—they’re the opinions of the Full Nerd podcast group alone. We didn’t hold staff-wide meetings or create elaborate Excel spreadsheets full of information about every gizmo reviewed in 2017. Instead, each member of the Full Nerd crew walked into the studio armed with their personal lists of the best hardware in each category, ready to cajole and convince the others to their cause. No one leaves until we’ve named every winner. And in the cases where we couldn’t break a deadlock, we turned to the live audience as the tiebreaker.

The joy of this award show lies in passionate debate, in the group discussion—in the journey. But if you’re interested in the destination alone, here’s a list of Full Nerd’s favorite PC hardware of 2017:

One of September's best PC games

After that we shift from hardware to software. A flood of great PC games released in September, and that’s just the start of the fall gaming deluge. Since game guru Hayden was around, we picked his brain on some of the best releases so far. Then we spent a long time chatting about how greedy loot boxes like the ones found in Star Wars Battlefront II, Forza Motorsport 7, and Middle-earth: Shadow of War are ruining gaming. (Spoiler alert: Hayden has an article on loot boxes going live tomorrow.)

Then we switched gears to another high-end topic: Intel’s proof-of-concept gaming PC, which can power four—count them, four—HTC Vive headsets in a single rig. It’s wild. Listen to the gang chat about it on Full Nerd and then check out our 4-way VR gaming PC article for a deeper dive into the tech specs.